This extreme case of the literature of personal language-of languages as they are formed in the practice of creative co-writing-was anticipated in the various forms of fantastic literature. Voyages (anticipated in Homer's epics), explorations of future worlds, and science fiction have paved the way for the writing of meta-fiction. This probably explains how Jorge Luis Borges constituted a meta-language (of the quotes of quotes of quotes) for allegories whose object are fictions, not realities. There is no need to be literate to effectively appropriate this kind of writing, although at some level of reading the literate allusion awaits the literate reader (at least to tickle his or her fancy). To a certain extent, it is almost better not to have read Madame Bovary, with its melodramatic account, because the constitution of Borges' universe takes place at a different level of human practice, and in a context of disconnected forms of praxis.
Co-writing also takes the form of using shared code as a strategy of literary expression. The many specialized languages of literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparative studies, phenomenological analysis, structuralism, semiotic interpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to the average literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages, are duplicated in the specialized language of creative post-modern writing. Reading requires a great deal of preparation for some of those works, or at least the assumed shared understanding of the particular language. The writings of Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barthe are not casual reading, for sheer enjoyment or excitement. Mastery of the language, moreover of the language code, as part of the practical experience it facilitates, does not come from studying English in high school or college, rather from decoding the narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose of this writing is knowledge about writing and reading. The epistemological made into a subject of fiction-how do we know what we know?-makes for very dense prose. This is why in this new stage, it is possible to have readers of a one and only book (I am not referring to the Bible or Koran), which becomes the language of that reader. Alice in Wonderland is such a book for quite a few; so is Ulysses; so are the two novels of William H. Gass. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience the emergence of micro-readership attracted to non-standard writing. Efficiency considerations are such that the non-standard practical experience of writing is met by a non-standard experience of reading books, and other media (including CD-ROM) that address a small number of people.
The effort to recycle (art or literature) is part of the same co-writing strategy. The co-writers are authors (recycled) and readers whose past readings (real or imaginary) are integrated in the new experience. Recycling (names, actions, narratives, etc.) corresponds to, among other things, the attempt to counteract the sequentiality of writing, even the literate expectation of originality. Taking a piece from a literary work and using it in its entirety means to almost transform the language sequence into a configuration. That piece resembles a painting hung in the middle of a page, or, to force the image, between the parts of a sonata. It entails its own history and interpretation, and triggers a mechanism of rejection not dissimilar to that triggered by organ transplants. The convention of reading is broken; the text is manipulated like an image and offered as a collage to the reader. The seams of different parts sewn together are not hidden; to the contrary, a spotlight is focused on them. Gertrude Stein best exemplifies the tendency, and probably how well it synchronized with similar developments in art (cubism foremost). W. H. Gass masterfully wrote about words standing for characters, object, and actions; he invented new worlds where the writer can define rules for their behavior. Concrete poetry, too, in many ways anticipated this type of writing, which comes from visual experiences and from the experiments in music triggered by the dodecaphonic composers. In concrete poetry, one can even discover the expression of jealousy between those interacting in the systematic domain of abstract phonetic languages, and those in the domain of ideograms. Japanese writers of concrete poetry seem equally eager to experience the sequential! The effort to recycle, interpret, visualize, to read and explain for the reader, and to compress (action, description, analysis) corresponds to the ever faster interactions of humans and to the shorter duration of such interactions. The reader is presented with pieces already known, or with easily understandable images that summarize the action or the characters. Why imagine, as writers always expected their readers to do, if one can see-this seems to be the temptation.
The end of the great novel
The ideal of the great novel was an ideal of a monument in literacy. Despite the technology for writing, such as word processing machines and the hypertext programs for interactive, collaborative authoring, writing the great novel is not only impossible, but irrelevant. Expectations associated with the great novel are expectations of unity, homogeneity, universality. Such a novel would address everyone, as the great novels of the civilization of literacy tended to do. The extreme segmentation of the world, its heterogeneity, the new rhythms of change and of human experiences, the continuous decline of the ideal embodied in literacy, education included, are arguments against the possibility of such a novel. An all-encompassing language, which the practical experience of writing such a novel implies, is simply no longer possible. We live in a civilization of partial languages, with their corresponding creative, non-standard writing experiences, in a disembodied domain of expression, communication, and signification. If, ad absurdum, various literary works could talk to each other (as their authors can and do), they would soon conclude that the shared background is so limited that, beyond the phrases of socializing and some political statements (more circumstantial than substantial), little else could be said.
Furthermore, writing itself has changed. And since there is a consubstantiality among all elements involved in the experience, the change affects the self-constitution of the writer, and subsequently that of the reader. Technology takes care of spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, as embodied in our practice with interface language-the language mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction, become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape, to be listened to while driving to work. The age of the electronic book brings other reading possibilities to the public. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand- held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know and activate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from the on-line dictionary. And this is not all!
Language used to be the medium for bridging between generations in the framework of homogeneous practical experiences. Edmund Carpenter correctly pointed out that for the civilization of literacy, the book-and what, if not the literary book, best embodies the notion of a book?-"became the organizing principle for all existence." Yes, the book seemed almost the projection of our own reality: beginning (we are all born), middle, and end (at which moment we become memory, the book itself being a form of memory), followed by new books. Carpenter went on to say, "Even as written manuscript, the book served as a model for both machine and bureaucracy. It encouraged a habit of thought that divided experience into specialized units and organized these serially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of command, assembly line, etc." Handwriting, typing, dictation, and word-processing define a context for the practical experience of self-identification as novelist, poet, playwright, screenplay author, and scriptwriter. Interaction with word-processing programs produces a fluidity of writing that testifies to endless self-correction, and to rewriting driven by association. Word-processing is cognitively a different effort from writing with a pen or typewriter. And no one should be surprised that what is written with the new media cannot be the same as the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoi, entrusted by hand to paper. A distributed narrative effort of many people, via network interaction, is a practical experience above and beyond anything we could have had in the framework of literacy.
The first comic strip in America (1896) announced the age of complementary expression (text and drawing). Nobody really understood how far the genre would go, or how many literacy-based conventions would be undone in the process. Comic-strip characters occupied a large part of the memory of those who grew up with the names of characters from books. The influence of new media (film, in particular) on the narrative of the strip opened avenues of experiments in writing. When classics of literature (even the Bible) were presented in comic-strip form, and when comic strips were united under the cover of books, the book itself changed. Structural characteristics of the strip (fast, dense, focused, short, expressive) correspond to those of the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy.
Does the civilization of illiteracy herald the end of the book? As far as the practice of creative writing goes, it might as well, since writing does not necessarily have to take a book format. Narrative, as we know from oral tradition, can take forms other than the book. My opinion in regard to books should not be understood as prophecy. Pointing to alternatives (such as digital books, electronic publications distributed on networks and stored on disks), some perhaps not thought through as yet, keeps the influence of our own framework of reference at a distance. A video format, as poor and unsatisfying a substitute as it might seem to someone raised with the book, is a candidate everyone can name. After all, the majority of the books studied a generation ago are known to the students of this time mainly through television and movie adaptations. The majority of today's children's books are released together with their video simuli. Computer-supported artifacts, endowed or not with literary intelligence, are another candidate for replacing the book. What we know is that paper can be handled only so much and preserved only so long (even if it is non-acid paper). Furthermore, it becomes more and more an issue of efficiency whether we can afford transforming our forests into books, which humankind, faced with many challenges, may no longer be able to afford, or which are so disconnected from current pragmatics that they have lost their relevance.
Today, while still entirely devoted to the ideal of literacy, societies subsidize literary practical experiences which are only peripherally relevant to human experience. A large number of grants go to writers who will probably never be read; many more to contests (themselves anchored in the obsession with hierarchy peculiar to literacy) open to students lost in the labyrinth of an illusion; and even more to schools and seminars of marginal or very narrow interest, or to publications that barely justify the effort and expense of their endeavor. From the perspective of the beneficiaries, awarding such grants is the right thing to do. In the long run, this altruism will not save more of the literacy-based literature than highly specialized contemporary society perceives as necessary in respect to efficiency requirements facing the world at the current scale. In labor division, the literate writer and reader constitute their systematic domain of interaction.
The book will no doubt remain in some form or another (words on paper or dots on an electronic page of a portable reading device) as long as people derive pleasure or profit from the printed word. But as opposed to the past, this is only one among many literary and non-literary domains of interaction. It is, for example, very difficult to say whether the artists of the graffiti movement were writers, using an alphabet reminiscent of Egyptian hieroglyphs, or painters with words, or both. Keith Haring, their best known representative, covered every available square inch-horror vacui-with expressions that constituted a new systematic domain of interaction among people, as well as a new space for his own self-constitution as a different type of artist.
Instead of decrying the end of an ideal, we should celebrate the victory of diversity. Those who really feel that their destiny relies on the ideal of literature might choose to give up some of their expectations, stimulated by the literate model, in order to preserve the structure within which literacy is possible and necessary. The demand for more at the lowest price that heralds the multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracy affects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or of cars and an insatiable appetite for travel. It affects our ways of writing, reading, painting, singing, dancing, composing, interpreting, and acting-our entire aesthetic experience.
Libraries, Books, Readers
Carlyle believed that "The true university is a collection of books." If books truly represent the spirit and letter of the civilization of literacy, a description of their current condition can be instructive. Obviously, one has to accept the possibility that the civilization of literacy will continue in some form, or in more than one, that will extend the experience of the book, as we know it today through its physical form. Or the civilization of literacy may continue in a totally new form that responds to the human desire for efficiency. Addressing the International Publishers Association Congress in June, 1988, George Steiner tried to identify the "interlocking factors" that led to the establishment of book culture. The technology of printing, paper production, and advances in typography that are associated with the "private ownership of space, of silence, and of books themselves" are among factors affecting the process. Another important factor is book aesthetics, the underlying formal quality of a medium that had to compete with vivid images, with powerful traditions of orality, and with patterns of behavior established within practical experiences different from those of book culture.
Near the end of the 15th century, Aldus Manutius understood that the new technology of printing could be, and should be, more than the mere continuation of the tradition of manuscripts. The artifact of the book, close to what we know today, is mainly his contribution to the civilization of literacy. Manutius applied aesthetic and functional criteria that led to the smaller-sized books we are familiar with. He worked with covers; the hard cover in thicker cardboard replaced the covers of pinewood used to protect manuscripts and early printed texts. The understanding of aesthetics and of the experience of reading led him to define better layouts and a new typography. His concern with portability (a quality obsessing contemporary computer designers), with readability (of no less interest to computer display experts), and with a balanced visual appearance make him the real saint of the order of the book.
The book also entails conventions of intellectual ownership. In their effort to stop the dissemination of heretical books through print, Philip and Mary, in 1557, limited the right of printing to the members of the Stationers' Company. In 1585, copyright for members was introduced; and in 1709, copyright for authors. From that time on, the book expanded the notion of property, different from the notion of ownership of land, animals, and buildings, especially in view of the desire, implicit in literacy, to literally spread the word. Now that desktop capabilities and technologies that facilitate print on demand affordably reproduce print, old notions of property and ownership need to be redefined. Our understanding of books and the people who read them, too, needs to be redefined as well.
Today, books can be stored on media other than sheets of paper, on which words are printed and which are bound between hard or soft covers. One hundred optical disks can store the entire contents of the Library of Congress. This means, among other things, that works of incredible significance cost five cents per book printed digitally. Another result is that the notion of intellectual ownership becomes fuzzy. Actually, the word book is not the proper one to use in the case of digital storage. The new pragmatics makes it crisply clear that the book is merely a medium for the storage and transmission of data, knowledge, and wisdom, as well as a lot of stupidity and vulgarity.
For people who prefer the book format, high-performance printing presses are able to efficiently provide runs for very precisely defined segments of the population just waiting for the Great American Novel that is custom written and produced for one reader at a time. "Personalized Story Books Starring Your Child," screams an advertisement. It promises "Hard cover, full color illustration, exciting stories with positive image building storylines." All that must be provided is the child's name, age, city of residence, and the names of three friends or relatives. The rest is permutation (and an order form). Grandma did a better job with her photo and keepsake album, but the framework of mediation replaced her long ago. Paper is available in all imaginable quantities and qualities; the technologies of typesetting, layout, image reproduction, and binding are all in place.
Nowadays, there is enough private space. The wash of noise is not a serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they do not wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were books published at more affordable prices than today. Some books reside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated in broader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from one book-let's say a new concept built upon earlier language experiences-connects the interested reader to other books and articles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and to images. The book is no longer a self-sufficient entity, but a medium for possible interaction.
At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how many books are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are they read? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to be posed when approaching the subject of books. Even more important is the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test of the book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of the civilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue is actually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the means through which an author can address many readers.
The fine balance of factors involved in the publishing and success of a book is extremely difficult to describe. The general trend in publishing can be described as more and more titles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a good manuscript (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays, scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successful book, i.e., one that sells. In the reality of the book business, many mediating elements determine the destiny of a manuscript. Most of these elements are totally unrelated to the quality of writing or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect market processes of valuation.
These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in the civilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competing literacies, almost all contradicting the intrinsic characteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life of books is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-free paper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; more books address limited groups of readers as opposed to a large general market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as was once the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages, depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languages convey contents frequently contradict the culturally acknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern to people who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilization based on books. More and more books end up as collections of images with minimal commentary. Some are already delivered together with a tape cassette or compact disk, to be heard rather than read, to be seen rather than to engage the reader's mind. Road Reading is a billboard trademark for recorded books. Narrated by voices appropriate to the subject (a southern drawl for a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice for Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete with red lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Many books written in our day contain vulgar language and elevate slang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are books that promise the excitement of a game (find the object or the criminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction of reading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject of reading has also changed since the time the Bible and other religious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientific writings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramatic fiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fiction and today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism.
Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book's condition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well as our own relation to books. To do this, we should examine the transition that defines the identity and role of the writer and reader in the new pragmatic context.
Why don't people read books?
"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellan asks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in video format and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman, answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines a context: The group that still reads is able to pass the benefits of their experience to people who are not allowed to read books. In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To the contrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating books printed in the past. But the question of whether people read any of the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction, cannot be dismissed.
The majority of the books changing hands and actually read are reference publications. The home contains an increasing number of radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, video cassette recorders, and computers. The shelf space for books is being taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library, people consecrate space in their homes for media centers that consume a great deal of their free time. Instead of the permanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability of continually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and of surfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormous amount of reference material. This material is, moreover, kept up to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish with bound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book.
Books are not burned, but neither are they read with much commitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary on the flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at the airport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of books are written for such purposes. Required reading for classes, according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of their pupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cycles and the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts, youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as they see it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge (information is probably a better word) is needed for a class or for a final examination. The real filter of reading is the multiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in a world brought to life by words.
All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of its arguments. The arguments are manifold and all related to characteristics of literacy. In the first place, publishers simply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realize that a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation, extended from the religious Book to books in general, keeps readers away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices.
How can one be involved in the practice of democracy without extending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a place equal to that of the cheap, mass- produced pulp literature and even the videotape? The experience of the book reveals a double-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that the book, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's Mein Kampf was such a book in Nazi Germany, and still is for Nazi revivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marx and Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after careful editing), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especially the young. Nobody could argue against even trivial factual errors that slipped into their writings, into translations, or into selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributed free to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authors of the same bent are published. These very few examples follow a long line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious, ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. As insidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not frankly criminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanistic expectations and on the practice of human-based values. Champions of literacy point to the classics of history and enlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, and drama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much space do they occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes? In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily conclude that from all the books stored in homes and places of public access, the majority should probably have never been written, never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals were only repetitive of what had been said and thought previously, they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgment expressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallowness and deceit are consecrated through the associations that the printed word entails.
Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm that people, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less and use books less and less for their practical experiences. Titles make it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas set forth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirm the prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto the bookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone in Italy, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of the Rose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be made into a movie." But even such books remain unread to the last page 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing and printing, books compete with the newspaper in capturing the sensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry, television, and publishing houses is very adept at squeezing the last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interest in order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaply manufactured books.
Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles, high cost of publishing and marketing, low transparency, rapid acquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsolete in one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceased to be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledge related to practical experiences. First among the factors affecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal and conversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change. Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Block, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics, and culture pertinent to that part of the world became useless from one day to the next as events and whims rendered their content meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel, even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around the world, strikes, various forms of social activism, political debates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaders contradicted the image of stability settled in the books of scholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligence agencies.
Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics, chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and brain theory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologies render obsolete facts associated with past observations published as eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten on tape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences or between book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books are being rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Web sites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selected pages and articles already substitute for the book on the desks of students, professors, scholars, and researchers. College students, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest in items that they know will be outdated and useless within a year. The book will appear in a new edition, either because the information has been updated or because the publisher wants to make more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closer to tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitive characteristics different from those of reading and writing. Or they prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitive experience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book.
The complexity of human practical experiences is as important as the dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and the book necessary was relatively homogeneous. Heterogeneity entails a state of affairs for which books can only serve after the experience, as a repository medium. Even in this documentary or historic function, books capture less than what other media, better adapted to sign processes irreducible to literacy, could. For the experience as such, books become irrelevant, whether we like it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of the increased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to be realized, much less recorded. What is available is the accumulated human experience with alternate media, not necessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted to instances of parallelism and distributed activities.
Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at the expense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxis is so radically disconnected from the nature of literacy embodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it without affecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is of the essence, and activities that require synchronization or are based on a configurational paradigm are different in nature from writing and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriate page, and to read and understand the information slows down (or stops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses the requirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutions to questions related to non-sequential connections.
In addition to these major factors, there is the broader background: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacy implies a shared literate experience. Shared experience, especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be assumed as a given. There are cultural as well as physical differences to be accounted for among all the human beings in the developed world. There are the visually impaired and physically handicapped who cannot use books. There are people with conditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printed letters and words. These individuals must rely on devices that read for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory.
The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentally different human practical experience of self-constitution. In line with the shift from manufacturing to service, books perform mainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced by a database), amusement, and filling time. Even if the great novel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it would go unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It might be that literature today is passionless, or it might be that the seduction of commercial success brings everything to the common denominator of return on an investment, regardless of cultural reward. Books written to please, books published to satisfy vanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactly trigger reader interest. All in all, good and bad considered, the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent. The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or lack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of its perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy, the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation within the continuum of writing.
The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracy suggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age of alternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing their best to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, as long as you read." They effectively discount any and all other means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise individuals who cannot read. There are many avenues to self-constitution: all our senses-including common sense-repetition and memory. Some of these avenues are more efficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, they would not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacy also imply that anything acquired through reading is good. The harm that can be transmitted through the book medium can be recorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led to persecution and violence, even mass destruction. On the individual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who is forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for developing other skills essential to his or her physical and mental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children is being stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is being stunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though there were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost its dominant position in our lives.
Topos uranikos distributed
This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today's typical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, the taxi driver with the college degree in political science. The underlying structure of human practical experiences through which average persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the Nobel prize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen, writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many other professionals), constitute themselves is characterized by a new type of relations among parts. These relations are in flux. Whereas many functions associated with human experiences can be rationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individual capabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is to harmonize the relation between human experience and the functioning of devices emulating human activities. This raises the issue of the altered human condition. In this context, the relevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in order to function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designed to blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to know the trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know how to access them when they are stored in a memory device, and how to charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has to know the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignore value altogether.
The roots of almost everything involved in current practical experiences are no longer effectively anchored in tradition, but in the memory of facts and actions extracted from tradition. At a time when books are merely an interior designer's concept of decoration, beautifully crafted editions fill the necessary bookcase. Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less grounded in nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the wind out of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of human self-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of any other known species. But this extension is not the sum total of genetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different quality that neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let alone explains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of the past, cultural as well as natural. That makes us like the many things we generated in the attempt to reach levels of efficiency which neither nature nor tradition can support. The hydroponic tomato, the genetically engineered low-fat egg, the digital book, and the human being of the civilization of illiteracy have more in common than one thinks at the mere mention of this opinion.
The life of books, good or bad, useful or destructive, entertaining or boring, is the life of those who read them. Free to constitute ourselves in a framework of human experiences opened to much more than books, we have the chance of exploring new territories of human expression and communication, and of achieving levels of significance. Individual performance in the civilization of literacy could not reach such levels. But this formulation is suspect of cheap rhetoric. It begs the question "Why don't we?" (accomplish all these potentialities). We are so many, we are so talented, we are so well informed. The civilization of illiteracy is not a promised land. Interactive education centers, distributed tasks, cooperative efforts, and cultivation and use of all senses do not just happen. Understanding new necessities, in particular the relation between the new scale of humankind and the levels of efficiency to be reached in order to effectively address higher expectations of well being, does not come through divine inspiration, high-tech proselytizing, or political speeches. It results from the experience of self-constitution itself, in the sense that each experience becomes a locus of interactions, which transcends the individual.
The realization of potential is probably less direct than the realization of dangers and risks. We are still singing the sirens' song instead of articulating goals appropriate to our new condition. One area in which goals have been articulated and are being pursued is the transfer of the contents of books from various libraries to new media allowing for storage of information, more access to it, and creative interaction. The library, perceived as a form of trans-human memory, a space of topos uranikos filled with eternal information, was the collection of ideas and forms that one referred to when in need of guidance. Robert de Sorbon gave his books to the University of Paris almost 750 years ago. Little did he know what this gesture would mean to the few scholars who had access to this collection. By 1302 (only 25 years after his donation), one of the readers would jot down the observation that he would need ten years to read the just under 1,000 books in the library. One hundred years later, Pembroke College of Cambridge University and Merton College of Oxford obtained their libraries. The Charles University in Prague, the universities in Krakow (Poland), Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), Heidelberg and Cologne (the future Germany), Basle (Switzerland), and Copenhagen (Denmark) followed suit. Libraries grew into national cultural monuments. Museums grew within them and then became entities in their own right. Today, billions of books are housed in libraries all over the world. Books are in our homes, in town and city libraries, in research institutions, in religious centers, in national and international organizations. Under the guise of literacy, we are happy to be able to access, regardless of the conditions (as borrowers or subscribers), this enormous wealth of knowledge. The library represented the permanent central storehouse of knowledge.
But the pragmatic framework of human self-constitution moved beyond the characteristics embodied by both library and book. Therefore, a new library, representative of many literacies-visual, aural, and tactile, relying on multimedia, and models and simulations-and able to cope with fast change had to come about. This library, to which we shall return, now resides in a distributed world, accessible from many directions and in many ways, continuously open, and freed from the anxiety that books might catch fire or turn into dust. True, the image of the world limited almost exclusively to reference books does not speak in favor of the enormous investment in time, money, and talent for taking the new routes opened by non-linear means of access to information, rich sensorial content, and interactivity. Still, in many ways Noah Webster's experience in publishing his dictionary-a reference for America as the Larousse is for France and the Duden for Germany-can be retraced in the multimedia encyclopedias of our day, moreover in the emergence of the virtual library.
In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote his prophetic article in the Atlantic Monthly. He announced, "Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them." He went on to illustrate how the lawyer will have "at his touch the associated opinions and decision of his whole experience." The patent attorney could call "the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client's interest." The physician, the chemist, the historian will use Bush's modestly named Memex to retrieve information. The conclusion, in a well subdued tone, was "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shoddy past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems."
Written immediately after World War II, Bush's article was concerned with applying the benefits of scientific research for warfare in the new context of peace. What he suggested as a rather independent application is now the reality of on-line communities of people working on related topics or complementing each other's work. The benefits of electronic mail, of shared files, of shared computing power are not what interest us here. Ted Nelson, whose name is connected to Project Xanadu, acknowledged the benefits deriving from Bush's vision, but he is mainly concerned with the power of linking. Nelson learned from literacy that one can link text to a footnote (the jump-link), to a quote (the quote-link), and to a marginal note (the correlink, as he calls it). He designed his project as a distributed library of ever new texts and images open to everyone, a medium for authoring thoughts, for linking to others, for altering texts and images. Multiplicity of interpretations, open to everyone else, ensures efficiency at the global level, and integrity at the individual level. He called his concept a thinker-toy, an environment that supports dedicated work without taking away the fun. Generalized beyond his initial scheme, the medium allows people to make notes, by either writing them, dictating them, or drawing diagrams. Text can be heard, images animated. Visualization increases expressivity. Participation of many readers enlarges the library while simultaneously allowing others to see only what they want to see. Privacy can be maintained according to one's wishes; interaction is under the control of each individual. In this generalized medium, videotapes, films, images from museums, and live performances are brought together. The rule is simple: "Accessibility and free linking make a two-sided coin." In translation: If someone wants or needs to connect to something, i.e., to use a resource created by someone else, the connection becomes available to all those to whom it might be relevant. Relinquishing the right to control links, established in the first place because one needed them, is part of the Xanadu agreement. It is part of the living library, without walls and bookshelves, called the World Wide Web.
Roads paved with good intentions are notorious for leading where we don't want to wind up. For everyone who has searched for knowledge in the Web's virtual library, it becomes clear very soon that no known search engine and no intelligent agent can effectively distinguish between the trivial and the meaningful. We have co-evolved with the results of our practical experiences. Selection neither increases the chances of the fittest, nor eliminates the biologically unfit. Cultural artifacts, books included, or for that matter, the zeroes and ones that are the making of digital texts of all kinds and all contents, illustrate the thesis no less than the increasing number of people kept alive who, under Darwin's law, would have died. These individuals are able to constitute their practical experiences through means, among which books and libraries do not present themselves as alternatives. Global networks are not a habitat for the human mind, but they are an effective medium for mind interactions of individuals who are physically far from being equal. Custom access to knowledge available in the virtual library is the main characteristic, more so than the wealth of data types and retrieval procedures.
The question posed at the beginning of this section, "Why don't we?" referring to the creative use of new means, finds one answer here. As more and more people, within their realms of needs and interests, become linked to what is pertinent to their existence and experience, they also enter an agreement of exchange that makes their linking part of the distributed space of human memory and creativity. The naked need to enter the agreement is part of the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy. Reading and enjoying a book implied an eventual return of money to the publisher and the writer. It might also have affected the reader in ways difficult to evaluate: Some people believe that good books make better people. Distributed environments of knowledge, expression, and information change the relation. From the world of orality-"Tell me and I will forget"-to that of literacy-"Let me read, but I might not remember"-a cognitive change, still evident today, took place. The next-"Involve me and I will understand"-began. The line of thought continues: Involvement returns value to others.
The Sense of Design
To design means to literally involve oneself in a practical experience with signs. To design means to express, in various signs, thoughts, feelings, and intentions pertinent to human communication, as well as to project oneself in artifacts appropriate to human practical experiences. In the remote age of direct practical experiences, there was no design. The practice of signs entails the possibility to transcend the present. In nature, future means insemination; in culture, future is in-signation: putting into sign, i.e., design. In its broadest definition, design is the self-constitution of the human being as an agent of change. This change covers the environment, conceiving artifacts (tools included), shelter, clothing, rituals, religious ceremonies, events, messages, interpretive contexts, interactions, and more recently, new materials and virtual realities. Shakespeare, who would have enjoyed the intense fervor of our age, gave a beautiful description of design: "…imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown" (Midsummer Night's Dream). Although design contains elements ensuing from experiences involving language, design is essentially a non-verbal human activity. Its means of expression and communication are grounded in the visual, but extend to sound, texture, odor, taste, and combinations of these (synaesthesia), including rhythm, color, and movement.
To the human being involved in practical experiences of self-constitution, the realm of nature appears as given. In counter-distinction and in retrospect, human nature appears as designed. In some cases, design is an act of selection: something is picked up from the environment-a stick, stone, plant-and assigned an a-natural function through implementation: mark territory, aid an activity, support a structure or the human body, trap animals or humans, attack or defend against attack, color skin or clothing. In other cases, selection is followed by some form of framing, such as the frame of the ritual around a totem pole, animal sacrifice, mourning, and celebrations of fecundity and victory. Selection and framing are related to efficiency expectations. They embody the hope for help from magic forces and express willingness to pursue goals that support the individual, family, and community. Between the present of any experience and the future, the experience of design bridges in the form of new patterns of interaction (through tools, artifacts, messages), recurrences, and extensions of consequences of human activity from the immediate to the future.
The projection of biology into an experience of long-lasting consequences implies elements of planning, no matter how rudimentary, and expectations of outcome. It also leads to new human relations in family-based interactions, education, shared values, and patterns of reciprocal responsibility. Random sexual encounters that reflect natural drives are not designs. Awareness of reciprocal attraction, shared feelings, and commitments extending well beyond the physical encounter can be identified as a design component present even in sexuality. Between the design component of sexual consequence of the evolving human being and the design of offspring by selection of a partner, by selection of genetic traits catalogued in semen banks, by genetic splicing and mutation, and by all that is yet to come upon us, there is a difference that reflects the altered human pragmatic condition.
Of real interest here is how the future is captured in design. Moreover, we want to know how it unfolds in practical experiences of design by which human beings extend their reality from here and now to then and there. In ways different from language, design gives the human being another experience of time and space. This experience is for the most part coherent with that of language. But it can also make individuals constituting themselves through design work aware of aspects of time that the language experience misses altogether or makes impossible. Designs are expressed in drawings and eventually complemented by models testifying to the experiences of volume, texture, and motion. The anticipated time dimension is eventually added in simulations. Design liberates the human being from total conditioning through language.
Within the convention of design, signs are endowed with a life of their own, supported by the energy of the persons entering the convention. This is how human symbolism, of confirmed vitality and efficiency, is factually established. Symbols integrated in human experience are given the life of the experience. The entire heritage of rituals testifies to this. Today the word ritual is used indiscriminately for any habitual preparation, from bathing to watching TV to after-game celebrations. Initially, rituals appeared as dynamic designs centered around episodes of life and death. Their motivation lay in the practical experience; their unfolding in connected interactions acquired an aesthetic quality from the underlying design.
From the earliest known experiences, the implicit aesthetic component is the optimizing element of the experience. This aesthetic component extends perceived formal qualities found in nature to the aesthetics of objects and activities in the realm of human nature. The language of design expresses awareness of these formal characteristics. Practical experiences display a repetitive pattern: the optimal choice (of shapes, colors, rhythms, sounds, movement) is always pleasing. The quality through which pleasure is experienced is not reducible to the elements involved, but it is impossible without them. Selection is motivated by practical expectations, but guided by formal criteria. Individuals involved in the earliest pragmatic framework were aware of this. Other formal criteria make up a generic background. One of the recurrent patterns of the practical experience of design is to appropriate the formal quality associated with what is pleasing in nature and to integrate it in the optimal shaping of the future. This is how the aesthetic dimension of human practical experiences resulted within such experiences.
Notation systems (e.g., the quipu, representational drawings on stone or on the ground, or hieroglyphics) that eventually became writing can be classified as design, not lastly in view of their aesthetic coherence. Only when rules and expectations defined by verbal language take over notation does writing separate from design and become part of the broader experience of language. We can now understand why changes in verbal language, as it constituted a framework for time and spatial experiences, were not necessarily reflected in changes in design. By the time literacy became possible, the underlying structure that led to it was embodied in the use of language. This is not true, to the same extent, in the practice of design. It is at this juncture that design is ascertained as a profession, i.e., as a practical domain with its own dynamics and goals. By no coincidence, engineering design emerged in the context of the pragmatics that began with building pyramids, ziggurats, and temples, and culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the design of machines. The broad premise of the Industrial Age is that everything is a machine: the house, the carriage, stoves, the contraptions used in literate education, schools, colleges, institutions, art studios, even nature.
From a relatively focused and homogeneous field of practical experiences within industrial society, design evolved, in the civilization of illiteracy, as an overriding concern that extended to many specialized applications: tool design, building and interior design (architecture), jewelry design, apparel design, textile design, product design, graphic design, and to the many fields of engineering (including computer-aided design), interactive media and virtual reality, as well as genetic engineering, new materials design, event design (applied to politics and various commodities), networking, and education. Technologies, from primitive to sophisticated, supporting visual languages made possible complexities for which the intuitive use of visual expression is not the most effective. Consequently, the scope of design-oriented practical experiences changed. Design now affords more integrative projects of higher levels of synaesthesia, as well as experiences involving variable designs-that is, designs that grow together with the human being self-constituted in practical interactions with the designed world.
In the pragmatic framework based on the digital, design replaced literacy more than any other practical experience has. The results of design are different in nature from those of literacy. As optimistic as one can become about a future not bound to the constraints of literacy, it takes more to comprehend the sense of design at a time when evolutionary progress is paralleled by revolutionary change.
Drawing the future
Drawing starts with seeing and leads to a way of envisioning and understanding the world different from the understanding filtered through language. From a cognitive viewpoint, drawing implies that persons constituting their identity in the act of drawing know the inside and the outside of what they render. To draw requires that things grow from their inside and take shape as active entities. Visible and invisible parts interact in drawing, surface and volume intersect, voids and fills extend in the visual expression, dynamically complementing each other. Each line of a drawing makes sense only in relation to the others. In contrast to words and sentences, elements of a drawing conjure understanding only through the drawing. Visual representation, as opposed to language expression, attains coherence as a whole, and the whole is configurational. One can write the word table without ever experiencing the object denominated. Extracted from direct or mediated experiences, knowledge about the object and its functions is a prerequisite for drawing an old table or conceiving a new one. To design means to express in a language that involves rendering. It also involves understanding that practical expectations are connected to the projected object. Consequently, to design means to experience the table in advance of its physical embodiment. Thus designing is the virtual practical experience, at the borderline between what is and what new experiences of self-constitution require.
In designing, people virtually project their own biological and cultural characteristics in whatever they conceive. This corresponds to the reality that design is derived from practical experiences, extending what is possible to what is desirable. Functionality expresses this condition, though only partially. With the emergence of conditions embodied in the underlying structure reflected in literacy, image and literate renditions-statements of goal and purpose, descriptions of means, procedures for evaluation-met. Literacy then effected changes in the condition of design. These are reflected as general expectations of permanence, universality, dualism, centralism, and hierarchy. International style-an expression that really covers more than the name of a style-reflects these literate expectations from design.
Is drawing natural? The meaning of such a question can be conjured only if articulated with its pendant: Is literacy unnatural or artificial? Everything already stated about drawing implies that it is not natural, though it is closer to what it represents than words are. Except for metaphoric qualifications, there is no such thing as drawing an abstraction of drawing, although there is abstract drawing. Through drawing, persons constitute themselves as having the ability to see, to understand (for instance, the invisible part of objects, how light affects an image, how color or texture makes an object seem lighter or rounder), to relate to the pragmatic context as definitory of the meaning of both the object-real or imagined-and the drawing. Different contexts make different ways of drawing possible. Disconnected from the context, drawing is almost like the babble of a child, or like a fragmented, unfinished expression. Vitruvius had a culture of drawing very different from that of the many architects who followed him. Critics who compared him to Le Corbusier and his architectural renditions, to the architects of post-structuralism, and to the deconstructivists and deconstructivist designers declared the drawings of these architects to be ugly, bad, or inappropriate (Tom Wolfe went on record with this). At this instance, drawing ceases to be an adjunct to art; it petitions its own legitimacy.
If we ignore the pragmatic context and the major transition from a design initially influenced by language-Vitruvius wrote a monumental work on architecture-the statement stands. But what we face here is a process in time: from design influenced by the pragmatics embodied in Vitruvius' work, to design subordinated to literacy, and finally to design struggling for emancipation as a new language, in which the critical component is as present as the constructive impulse to change the world.
Design carries over many formal requirements from practical experiences subordinated to literacy. But there is also an underlying conflict between design and language, moreover between design and literacy. This conflict was never resolved inside the experience of designing. In society, literacy imposed its formative structure on education, and what resulted was design education with a strong liberal arts component. Needless to say, designers, whether professionals in the field or students (designers-to-be), resented and resent the assumption that their trade needs to be elevated to the pedestal of the eternal values embodied in literacy. Instead of being stimulated to discover the need for literacy-based values in concrete contexts, design and design education are subjected to the traditional smorgasbord of history, language, philosophy, a little science, and many free choices. Its own theoretic level, or at least the quest for a theory, is discarded as frivolous. Moreover, the elements grouped under intuition are systematically explained away, instead of being stimulated.
Whereas the context of education allows for the artificial maintenance of literacy- based training programs in design, the broader context of pragmatic experiences confirms the dynamic changes design brought about since the profession ascertained its identity. The conflict between training and engaging prompted efforts to free design from constraints that affect its very nature: How do we get rid of the mechanical components of design (paste-up, rendering, model making)? These efforts came from outside the educational framework and were stimulated by the general dynamics of change from the pragmatics of literacy to the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy. The change brought about the emergence of new design tools that open fresh perspectives for the expression of design: animation, interactivity, and simulation. It also encouraged designers to research within the realm of their domain, to inquire into the many aspects of their concern, and to express their findings in new designs. The computer desktop and various rapid prototyping tools brought execution closer to designers. It also introduced new mediating layers in the design process.
Breakaway
The majority of all artifacts in use today are either the result of the design revolution at the beginning of the 20th century, or of efforts to redesign everyday objects for use in new contexts of practical experiences. From the telephone to the television set, from the automobile to the airplane and helicopter, from the lead pencil to the fountain pen and disposable ball-point pen, from the typewriter to the word processor, from cash registers to laser readers, from stoves to microwave ovens-the list can go on and on-a new world has been designed and manufactured. The next world is already knocking at the door with robots, voice commanded machines, and even interconnected intelligent systems that we might use, or that might use us, in some form. The steam and pneumatic engines fired by coal, oil, or gas are being replaced by highly efficient, compact, electric or magneto-electric engines integrated in the machines they drive, controlled by sophisticated electronic devices.
There is almost nothing stemming from the age that made literacy necessary that will not be replaced by higher efficiency alternatives, by structurally different means. What about the technology of literacy? One can only repeat what once was a good advertisement line: "The typewriter is to the pen what the sewing machine (Remember the machine driven by foot power?) is to the needle." Remington produced the beautiful Sholes and Glidden typewriter in the 1870's. It was difficult to decide whether the ornate object, displaying hand-stenciled polychrome flowers, belonged in the office or in a Victorian study. Now it is a museum piece. Compare it to the word processor of today. Its casing might survive the renewal cycle of two to three years that hardware goes through. The chip's processing abilities will double every eighteen months, in accordance with Moore's Law. The software, the heart and mind of the machine, is improved almost continuously. Now it provides for checking spelling, contains dictionaries, checks syntax and suggests stylistic changes. Soon it will take dictation. Then it will probably disappear; first, because the computer can reside on the network and be used as needed, and second, the written message will no longer be appropriate in the new context. Those who question this rather pedestrian prediction might want to ask themselves some other questions: Where is the ornamental ink stand, the beautiful designs by Fabergé and Tiffany? Where are the fountain pens, the Gestetner machines? Carbon paper? Are they replaced by miniature tape recorders or pocket computers, by integrated miniature machines that themselves integrate the wireless telephone? Are they replaced by the computer, the Internet browser, and digital television? Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave us the slogan "The pen is mightier than the sword." Today, the function of each is different from what it was when he referred to them. They became collectibles. The disposable pen is symptomatic of a civilization that discards not only the pen, but also writing.
The breakaway of design occurs first of all at structural levels. It is one thing to write a letter, manuscript, or business plan with a pencil, quite another to do the same on a typewriter, and even more different to use a word processor for these purposes, or to rely on the Internet. The cognitive implications of the experience-what kinds of processes take place in the mind-cause the output to be different in each case. No medium is passive. In each medium, previous experiences and patterns of interaction are accumulated. The more interaction there is to a process, and sometimes to a collaborative effort, the more the condition of writing itself changes. We can think of messages addressed to many people at once. Think of the Mullah chanting evening prayers at the top of a minaret; or of the priest addressing a congregation; of the president of a nation using the powerful means of television, or of a spammer on the Internet, distributing messages to millions of e-mail addresses. Each communication is framed in a context constituting its parameters of pre-understanding. To the majority, spam means no more than chopped meat in a can. Even today, over 50% of the world's people have never used a telephone. And with some 50 million people on the Internet, Netizenship is more vision than reality.
Design as a semiotic integrative practical experience is a matter of both communication and context. The possibility to customize a message so that it is addressed not to an anonymous group (the believers gathered for the occasion, or members of society eager to learn about political decisions affecting their lives), but to each individual, reflecting concern for each one's individual condition and respect for his or her contribution in a system of distributed tasks, was opened by design. The semiosis of group and mass communication is very different from the semiosis of pointcasting. Technologically, everything is available for this individualized communication. However, it does not occur because of the implicit literate expectation in the functioning of church, state, education, commerce and other institutions. Design experiences submit the centrality of the writer to reassessment. One relates to the literate model of one-to-many communication. This model is based on the assumption of hierarchy, within a context of sequential interaction (the word is uttered, the listener understands it, reacts, etc.). In the industrial pragmatic framework, this was an efficient model. Perfected through the experience of television, it reached globality. But scale is not only sheer numbers. More important are interactions, intensities, the efficient matching of each individual's needs and expectations. Thus, efficiency no longer means how many individuals are at the receiving end of the communication channel, but how many channels are necessary to effectively reach everyone. A different design can change the structure of communication and introduce participatory elements. For those still captive to literacy, the alternative is the ubiquitous word-processed letter matched to a list in a database. For those able to re-think and reformulate their goals, effectiveness means transcending the literate structure.
The challenge begins at knowing the language of the individuals, mapping their characteristics (cognitive, emotional, physical), and addressing them specifically. The result of this effort is represented by individualized messages, addressing in parallel people who are concerned about similar issues (environment, education, the role of the family). Moreover, it is possible to have many people write together, or to combine one person's text with someone else's image, with animation, spoken words, or music. In the design effort that takes the lead here, hierarchies are abolished, and new interactions among people are stimulated. The design that leads to such patterns of human experiences must free itself from the constraints of sequentiality. Such design can no longer be subject to the duality of good or bad, as frequently related to form (in particular, typography, layout, coherence). Rather, it covers a continuum between less appropriate to very well adapted to the scope of the activity. No longer cast in metal, wood, or stone, but left in a soft condition (as software or as a variable, self-adaptive set of rules), the design can improve, change, and reach its optimum through many contributions from those who effectively constitute their identity interacting with it. The user can effectively finish the design by choosing identifiers and modifying, within given limits, the shape, color, texture, feel, and even function of the artifact.
There is also a deeper level of knowing the language of the individuals addressed. At this level, to know the language means to know the experience. Henceforth, the new design no longer takes place at a syntactic or a semantic level, but is pragmatically driven. To reach every individual means to constitute a context for a significant practical experience: learning, participation in political decisions, making art, and many others. But let us be realistic as we experience the urge to convey a sense of optimism: the common practical experience involves partaking in the distribution of the wealth and prosperity generated in this extremely efficient pragmatic framework. As discouraging as this might sound, in the last analysis, consumption, extremely individualized, constitutes the most engaging opportunity for efficient pointcasting. The questions entertained today by visionaries, innovators, and venture capitalists placing their bets on the Internet might not always make this conclusion clear.
Convergence and divergence
Telecommunications, media, and computation converge. What makes the convergence possible and necessary is a combination of factors united in the necessity to reach efficiency appropriate to human practical experiences at the global scale of existence and work. It is within this broad dynamics and inner dynamics that design ascertains itself as a force for change from the civilization of literacy to the civilization of many, sometimes contradictory, literacies. A shirt used to be mere clothing; the T-shirt became, in view of many concurrent forces, a new icon, a sui generis medium of communication. The commercial aspect is obvious. For example, each university of certain renown has licensing arrangements with some manufacturer who advertises the name on the walking billboards of chests, backs, and bellies. The T-shirt effectively replaces wordy press statements and becomes an instance of live news. Before Operation Desert Storm got into full swing, the T-shirt already signaled love for the troops or, alternatively, anti-war sentiment. Magic Johnson's admission that he had tested HIV positive was followed, less than two days later, by the "We still love you" T- shirts in Los Angeles.
The quasi-instantaneous annotation of events is in keeping with the fast change of attitudes and expectations. Institutions have inertia; they cannot keep up with the rhythm of the times. The news, formed and conveyed outside the institution of media, reads as a manifesto of immediacy, but also as a testimony to ephemerality. We actually lose our shirts on the immediate, not on the permanent. Design projects this sense of immediacy and ephemerality not only through T-shirts or the Internet. The house, clothes, cars, the Walkman, everything is part of this cycle. Is design the cause of this, or is it something else, expressed through design, or to which designers become accomplice? The shorter fashion cycles, the permanent renewal of design forms, the 30-second drama or comedy of advertisement-more appropriate to the rhythms of existence than never-ending soap-operas-the new VLSI board, the craze for designer non-alcoholic beer or low-fat pork-all testify to a renewal speed met by what seems an inexhaustible appetite on the side of our current commercial democracy. The refresh rate of images on our TV sets and computer monitors, predicated by the intrinsic characteristics of technology and human biology, is probably the extreme at which cycles of change can settle.
To take all this with enthusiasm or trepidation, without understanding why and how it happens, would contradict the basic assumption pursued in this book. The pragmatic context of high efficiency is also one of generalized democracy, extended from production to consumption. The ubiquitous engine driving the process is the possibility, indeed necessity, of human emancipation from all possible constraints. The experience of design acknowledges that emancipation from constraints does not ultimately result in some kind of anarchic paradise. The right to partake in what human experiences generate often takes the form of taste that is equalized and rendered uniform, and of ever-expanding choices that ultimately turn out be mediocre.
As a reaction to the implicit system of values of literacy, related to limited choices, illiterate design expression does not impose upon the user in design, but involves the user in choices to be made. In this way, design becomes an indicator of the state of public intelligence, taste, and interest. It also points to a new condition of values. The indicator might not always show a pretty picture of who we are, and what our priorities are. The honest interpretation of such an indicator can open avenues to understanding why the Walkman-which seems to seduce people by an ideal of insulation from others-has the success it has, why some fashion designs catch on and others don't, why some car models find acceptance, why movies on significant themes fail, and why, on a more general level, quality does not necessarily improve under circumstances of expectations in continuous expansion. New thresholds are set by each new design attempt. The wearable computer is yet another gadget in the open- ended development that unites evolution and revolution.
The need to achieve high levels of efficiency corresponding to the current human scale is probably the aspect most ignored. Efficiency, pre-programmed through design, confirms that human involvement is expensive (do-it-yourself dominates at all levels of design), and service more profitable than manufacturing in developed countries. None of these solutions can be taken lightheartedly. After all, design bridges to the future, and to bridge to a world of depleted resources, destroyed ecology, and a mediocre human condition is not necessarily a good reason for optimism. The goal of reducing human involvement, especially when the human is forced into exhausting and dangerous experiences, is very attractive, but also misleading. To reduce human involvement, energies different from those of an individual involved in experiences of self-constitution as a user need to be provided. Faced with the challenge posed by the dualistic choice expectations vs. resources, designers often fail to free themselves from the literate ideology of dominating nature. Fortunately, design based on co-evolution with nature is gaining momentum. So is the design of materials endowed with characteristics usually associated with human intelligence.
The inherent opposition between means and goals explains the dynamics of design in our time. Extremely efficient methods of communication lead to information saturation. New methods for designing result in an apparent overabundance of artifacts and other products of design. It seems that the driving force is the possibility to practically meet individual expectations at levels of productivity higher than those of literacy-based mass production, and at costs well below those of mass production. The challenge-how to maintain quality and integrity-is real and involves more than professional standards. Market-specific processes, probably well reflected in the notion of profit, affect design decisions to the extent that often human practical experiences in the market result in under-designing or over-designing negotiated items. Changing expectations, as a consequence of rapidly changing contexts of human experiences, affect the design cycle even more than the production cycle. The ability to meet such changes by a built-in design variability is, however, not only a test of design, but also of its implicit economic equation.